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The Cookie Conundrum

This entry was written by one of our members and submitted to our YouMoz section.The author's views below are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz.

I have been going back and forth with SEOmoz’s Danny Dover for the past couple weeks regarding a crawling error occurring within the site I am currently doing SEO for. He has been a tremendous help to me, and believes others may be having the same issues as I. So…low and behold, I’m going to discuss it here in hopes of finding others just like me and some further expertise on how to handle the situation.

The site I’m working on currently has three country sites:

www.mysite.com

uk.mysite.com

ca.mysite.com

When a user first visits the site, they are brought to a splash page in which they must choose their appropriate country before entering the site. Cookies are enabled on this particular splash page so that when the user revisits, they are brought back to the country-specific site they last visited, rather than tossing them to the splash page every time. While this is very helpful for the user, it is causing some issues with the search engines. Here is a summary of those issues:

The site REQUIRES that the user enable cookies to access the rest of the site.

Since search engines do not enable cookies, they cannot crawl the site’s pages.

When they try to crawl the site, they are brought back to the splash page.

Because of this, they are not able to access the rest of the site.

Without accessing the entire site, search engines are unable to properly index the pages.

What is interesting is that the majority (I’d say 90%) of pages are in fact in Google’s index (as well as Yahoo! and MSN) and show up in the SERPs. The site’s pages also show up in #1 positions and above the fold positions for a great majority of keywords I’ve optimized for.

Danny suggested this is because of links to those pages (in terms of internal linking structure, not links from external sources).

Danny and a monkey I know another SEO I know suggested a few possible solutions to this issue:

Decide if the cookie feature is really necessary. If so, it might be enough to simply show the proper version of the website based on the TLD or subdomain of the domain the user enters. Include flag links to other countries throughout each site so the user knows they can view other versions.

Locate users based on their IP. The downside to this one is that you will also identify the search engines by IP and limit the versions of the site that are available to non-US users.

Make the US site the main priority and include flag links on every page so users know they can view the other versions should it be more useful for them. The downside to this is that every user will first hit the US version, making it not as user-friendly

I am at a loss of what the proper procedure is for handling such a situation. It would be great to get a discussion going on this and collaborate on the proper solution. If anything, I’m hoping to find someone who has also experienced such a problem so I don’t feel so alone here!

If it had been up to me, I would have built separate sites for each country, but what do I know?

11 Comments

I would go with a combination of all 3. Drop the cookies and use this geolocation service to identify where people are located and serve the appropriate site, but always provide the flags so users can switch, and so that search engines can still access and index all of the content.

1. On session start, IF language cookie exists (look at the step 3) serve this language ELSE use geolocation. That way you will always serve version based on geolocation results to the spiders, because they will not pass language cookie IF check.

I've had some experience with this in the past. In our experience, we used a visual on each of the "Home" Pages of the different languages. Users could then click on the region they were from and be redirected to that section of the site.

In order to get back, they simply could go back to the Front Page, or use a Language Drop down menu that we had incorporated.

I agree with the others in that losing the Cookies is definitely the way to go.

Thanks for your response, Jordan. What you have stated could definitely be an option. The site already has flags on the top and bottom of EVERY page giving users the option to switch sites at any time. It would be an easy transition.

I think whitespark has the right idea, lose the cookies and go with IP geolocation. Also, this topic has been covered pretty extensively (though arguably not enough) by seomoz in the past, but Will Critchlow made a great post about it :

Also...you are correct, the geolocation topic has been covered extensively. However, how to handle splash pages and cookies in relation to this topic has not (or at least I have not come across it - and I've done some homework).

It's great to see you added this to YouMoz. I will be the first to admit that the crowd of SEOs that visit SEOmoz are smarter than I am alone. They have proven that to me over and over again with their advice via blog comments and e-mails.

It looks like the previous commenters have given you a solid solution. If you plan on implementing this, be sure to let us know how this goes. Best of luck!